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Friday, July 11, 2014

Forgotten Books: The Bitch - Gil Brewer

With a title like THE BITCH and
an author like Gil Brewer, you'd expect that this novel would have a femme
fatale in it, and you'd be right. In fact, it sort of has two.

The narrator and protagonist, Tate Morgan, is a private detective who works for
his brother Sam's agency in Tampa. He's hired by a rich man to find out if the
guy's beautiful young wife is cheating on him. We've all read enough of these
novels to know how that's going to turn out. Of course she's cheating on him—with
Tate. Whose life is complicated by his own beautiful wife who keeps pressuring
him to make something of himself instead of being content to work for his
brother. So given all that, when the agency gets the job of guarding a big
payroll for the company that belongs to Tate's client, it's no great stretch to
figure that payroll is going to be heisted in an inside job.

Brewer never lets things play out exactly the way you'd expect, though. Sure,
Tate winds up on the run from both the cops and the crooks with a satchel full
of money, accused of murders he didn't commit, but there are some nice twists
along the way. As usual, Brewer does a great job with the tropical setting and
with capturing the sweaty desperation that grips most of the characters in this
fast-moving novel. His writing seems really sharp to me, with a lot of lines
that are pure hardboiled poetry.

This book was published originally by Avon in 1958 and seems to be one of the
more scarce Gil Brewer novels. It's currently available in an e-book edition
from Prologue Books and is well worth reading for fans of noir crime novels.